Cobalt is coming to Steam, Xbox One, and Xbox 360 on February 2! The game will cost $19.99, and comes with a single-player story campaign, challenge maps, co-op survival maps, and several multiplayer game modes for both local and online play.

If you’ve pre-purchased the alpha you will get a Steam code added to your Mojang account. We will only release the Windows version now, so Mac and Linux users will have to wait just a little bit longer. This is because we switched game engines (from DaisyMoon to Stingray) in order to add online multiplayer.

Since the last post we’ve been busy with distilling the game, starting our collaboration with Fatshark to bring Cobalt to Xbox and we’ve been to Minecon.

Being a small team with the main focus to have fun, the development of Cobalt has always been a bit haphazard where we’ve added stuff as we go with less focus on the bigger picture and more attention spent on what felt right at the moment. This has led to, in our opinion, a great platformer but it has also resulted in a lot of features that remain hidden to the average player. When a new player starts up Cobalt, he or she isn’t really introduced to what the game is about. There’s nothing to hold their hand and present them with the experience that is Cobalt, especially not as a single player. I’m not talking about a next-gen like dumbing down of game play, but a coherent presentation of the actual game.

What we have now is a whole bunch of puzzle pieces hovering in the air waiting to be placed in the correct spot. Since starting our collaboration with Fatshark we’ve been busy trimming and arranging all pieces in order to put them down in a presentable larger picture and an enjoyable gaming experience from start to finish.

I want to thank everyone who showed interest in Cobalt during Minecon 2012! It was a fantastic weekend for us and I really enjoyed helping people around the Cobalt areas. We held our first official 1v1 DM tournament, in which community member Acontin won first place followed by Ivar from Sweden.

The version used at Minecon was v116 ALPHA, and is not yet available for download. Among other things, it featured a new game mode called Challenge. In Challenge, you focus on doing things as fast as possible, like getting from point A to B. Today we created more maps for the mode. Here is a sneak preview:

We have also added local high score lists with epic voice acting feedback by Kinten to all relevant game modes:

Huge thanks to all the volunteers during Minecon that made it all possible!

It’s over 1.5 years since we wrote about the 1.17 update to Harvest, and finally we’re able to release an updated version. It won’t be 1.17, but 1.18 (fixing a couple of more things), and this time also with builds for Linux!

The game changes are:

Invert scroll direction setting

Added drag-and-place buildings, if you keep the mouse pressed the game will place the next building at the edge of the energy range from the previous one

Made it possible to select and sell multiple buildings at once, also added “getSelectedBuildings” Lua hook

Added an option for the defenses to hold fire

Shaded map edge

Map expansion marker line

Double-size minimap for resolutions larger than 800×600

Changed damage calculation of missile turrets

Removed the age limit of solar plants

Removed the boss aliens

Energy links will attempt to avoid sending energy to links that are pointing towards itself

Made it possible to change language setting in the settings menu

Changed so that Poseidon and Ares are unlocked by gaining award points

We at oxeye are currently hard at work with bringing the Cobalt pre-order to you ASAP. In preparations for this we would like to share our visions of what Cobalt is and how the development of the game will play out over the coming months.

I am very excited about getting this alpha going as soon as possible, but in reality it looks like we are not going to be making it in October since ironically the pre-order stuff will not be ready until the very last of October. But its not all bad cause I love to polish stuff! I will be working like a beast in the meantime to make the alpha as enjoyable as possible.

While we await the “days of alpha”, I would like to take this opportunity to find out some stuff about who you are but more importantly, what your hardware is! this thread!

Today we can announce that we are going to collaborate with Mojang (creators of Minecraft and Scrolls) to bring Cobalt to the masses Mojang will help us with marketing, publicity and distribution, while we continue to develop and add stuff to Cobalt. This is more of a team effort than the usual developer/publisher combo, and the first experimental attempt for Mojang to help another indie game developer to launch their game.

We will go with Mojang to PAX Prime to demo Cobalt and take on challengers at our 2-on-2 Capture the Plug booth. If you are at PAX, make sure you pay us a visit. We have launched a Cobalt-dedicated site at www.PlayCobalt.com with the specifics and a brand new Cobalt trailer!

PS. If you want to contact us, send a tweet in our general direction (@OxeyeGames, @vraket, @jeb_, @Kinten or @anosou), or an email to info@oxeyegames.com

Since the beginning of time we’ve had problems keeping our forums clean from spam. At one point our Dawn of Daria forum had over 30,000 bot accounts, and the forums here at OxeyeGames.com have had their share of dildos and ads for online drug stores. Upgrading the spam filters doesn’t seem to help much, and we’re growing tired of it.

We discussed closing down the forums altogether since it’s easier to contact us via Twitter (@vraket, @kinten, @jeb_ and @anosou) or email anyway, but having forums is a good way of letting players get in touch with each other. So our new idea is to piggy-back on the Reddit and create an Oxeye-related community there, which hopefully will be easier to keep relevant.